The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [152]
"You think you know all the angles, but you never do," Brown said. "Like before with that garage deal, you were lucky. You think we knew there were Japs? I'll tell ya, Stanley, it was the same with you there. How the hell did you know when something was gonna pop? It's the same with my old game, selling. There's tricks, there's ways to grab the big money, but you're never sure."
"Yeah," Stanley said. He was not really listening. Stanley was feeling a diffused rebellion at the things that made him worried and envious, made him always ferret for some advantage. He did not know what caused it in himself, but without putting it into words he was brooding that there would be many nights through all the rest of his life when he would lie sweating and restive, prey to all the latest torments of his mind.
11
The campaign had gone sour. After the week of successful advances that followed the failure of the Japanese attack across the river, Cummings had paused for a few days to strengthen his lines and complete his road net. It had been planned as a temporary halt before breaching the Toyaku Line, but the layoff was fatal. When Cummings started again, his tactics were as well conceived as they had ever been, his staff performances as thorough, his patrols as carefully planned, but nothing happened. The front had been given its first chance to solidify, and like a weary animal it had done even more; it had fallen asleep, it had hibernated. A deep and unshakable lethargy settled over the front-line troops.
In the two weeks that followed the rest period, after a series of intensive patrols and strong local attacks, his lines had advanced a total of four hundred yards in a few sectors, and had captured a total of three Japanese outposts. Companies went out on combat patrols, engaged in desultory fire fights, and then retreated back to their bivouacs. The few times an important piece of terrain was taken, the men had relinquished it at the first serious counterattack. As a sure sign of the reluctant temper of the troops, the best line officers were becoming casualties now, and Cummings knew the type of engagement that signified. An attack would be made on some strong point, and the men would lag behind, the co-ordination would be poor, and it would end with a few men, a few good officers, and noncoms engaging a superior force while their support evaporated.
Cummings made several trips to the front and found the men had bedded down. The bivouacs had been improved, there were drainage pits and overhead covers on the foxholes, and in a few companies duckwalks had been laid in the mud. The men would not have done this if they expected to move. It represented security and permanence, and it introduced a very dangerous change in their attitudes. Once they halted and stayed in one place long enough for it to assume familiar connotations, it was immeasurably harder to get them to fight again. They were dogs in their own kennel now, Cummings decided, and they would bark sullenly at orders.
Each day that elapsed without any fundamental change on the front would only increase their apathy, and yet Cummings knew that he was temporarily powerless. After intense preparation, he had mounted a large attack with good artillery plotting, some Air Corps bomber support which had been granted only after much pleading, had thrown his tanks into it, his reserve troops, and after a day the attack had ground down to nothing; the troops had halted before the most insignificant resistance, had gained in one small sector perhaps a quarter mile. When they had done and the losses been counted, the minor alterations in his front line established, he had all of the Toyaku Line still before him, unbreached, unthreatened. It was humiliating. Indeed, it was terrifying. The communications from corps and